


Impossible (the unwasted potential remix)

by TardisIsTheOnlyWayToTravel



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-30
Updated: 2014-04-30
Packaged: 2018-01-21 08:20:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1544072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TardisIsTheOnlyWayToTravel/pseuds/TardisIsTheOnlyWayToTravel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark is an impossible man to work for. Everyone asks why Pepper Potts still does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Impossible (the unwasted potential remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [unsettled](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unsettled/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Impossible](https://archiveofourown.org/works/137553) by [unsettled](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unsettled/pseuds/unsettled). 



**Impossible (the unwasted potential remix)**

Tony Stark is an impossible man to work for. Everyone who’s ever met him knows this, knows it as a deep and incontrovertible fact: he’s obnoxious and procrastinates and forgets important things (or simply disregards them), and spends half his life drunk as a lord. Then there’s his playboy reputation, and the fact that anyone who works for him finds that a not-insignificant amount of their time is spent in the delicate pastime of getting rid of his one-night-stands, many of whom don’t appear to realize that this is what they are until Tony vanishes in the early hours of the morning and never comes back.

Working for Tony Stark is a full-time job, and Pepper’s duties go far beyond what would be expected of her if she were working for anybody else. Everyone she speaks to is astonished she’s lasted this long: every other PA Tony has ever had quit within a matter of months, and yet here Pepper still is, working for him years later with her usual competence and exasperated dedication.

 _Why on earth do you work for him still?_ people ask, and Pepper usually laughs. _For the money,_ she says, some days. _Well, I like a challenge,_ she says on others.

The truth is rather more difficult to articulate, even to herself. Tony Stark is infuriating, obnoxious, irresponsible and profligate: but he’s also brilliant, intensely focused on what matters to him, and could change the world if it ever occurred to him to do so. He has a potential that has been enormously under-utilized, but Pepper sees it, all the same, and hopes that someday, Tony will reach that potential.

The truth of the matter is this: that even Tony Stark has to grow up sometime, and Pepper hopes that someday, she’ll be there to see it.

* * *

Part of the problem is this: that there are so few people that Tony respects, and he respects himself least of all.

Oh, he has his ego and bravado, both enormous, but that sense of self-worth, the belief that you are a worthy person, that you are innately of value to the world simply in being who you are, the thing that keeps Pepper’s head held high no matter what the world and Tony throws at her… at his core, Tony lacks that. Pepper doesn’t know exactly why, although Tony’s complicated love-hate relationship with his father’s memory is a big clue. But it means that Tony does whatever he wants, because there’s no one he respects enough to let them stop him; gets wasted and has long strings of meaningless affairs because he believes he isn’t capable of anything better, and even if he were, he doesn’t believe he deserves it.

Other people are put off by the obnoxiousness Tony wears like an omnipresent cloak, but Pepper knows him well-enough to see beyond it, to see that particular expression that means Tony is about to throw up a joking defense, or the bright, insincere smile that covers anything genuine that Tony feels. She can’t imagine how it feels to live like that, how much Tony must hate himself to never be anything but this meticulously-constructed persona. The only time Tony is ever really, truly himself is when he is working with his machines, with that look of immense focus, his touch almost reverent as he handles each delicate piece of machinery. Then, and only then, does Tony throw himself into what he does: he creates things that are beyond the scope of what anyone else believes to be possible, designs that are fifteen, twenty years beyond what the rest of the market is capable of producing.

Most of these designs never see the light of day: Stark Industries, after all, primarily produces weapons. They’re not in the business of producing anything else.

But if Pepper didn’t know already what Tony could do, if he were to create anything he felt like creating, then the invention of JARVIS would tell her everything. He’s undoubtedly Tony’s crowning achievement, but sometimes Pepper hopes that someday, Tony creates something else just as wonderful and impossibly unique.

She isn’t holding her breath.

* * *

Everything changes after Afghanistan. Tony comes back haunted, grim, comparatively silent, but with an intense look in his eyes. Pepper doesn’t know what it heralds, at first.

There’s a bright glow at the centre of Tony’s chest, and Pepper doesn’t know whether to be awed or horrified to discover that he has a miniaturized arc reactor in his chest. She settles on horrified, although the awe is still there: Stark Industries’ scientists have been trying for decades to do what Tony has done, and he did it in a cave in Afghanistan, out of spare parts and an iron will to survive. If nothing else, Tony has proven that he’s tougher than people think, and is more than some pampered billionaire. He’s achieved something else that no one ever has, and Pepper doesn’t think, somehow, that this is the end of it.

She’s right. Tony is still reckless and annoying and willfully disorganized, but other things have changed. He stops appearing in the papers in stories of drunken debauchery, his latest conquest on one arm. There are no longer mortifying photographs of him falling into fountains, too drunk to walk straight. Instead, Tony stops the excessive drinking, and his one-night-stands are replaced with all-nighters in his workshop, that intense look always in his eyes whenever Pepper sees him. Tony has become a different man, someone driven by motives that she cannot quite understand.

Pepper thinks: _He’s finally grown up._

In some ways it’s a terrible thing to think: Pepper knows that he has scars from his experiences, both literally and figuratively, knows about the PTSD and the nightmares and the trust issues, and the haunted way Tony sometimes stares into space when he thinks no one is looking. But Tony is acting like he’s found a purpose, some meaning to life that it never had before, some kind of certainty within himself, and Pepper can’t help but think that it’s a good look on him.

She’s always been fond of him, even at her most exasperated – Tony grows on you, like some sort of terrible fungus – even when she thought he wasn’t ever likely to be anything more than a brilliant but obnoxious, drunken playboy. But this man – this dedicated, brilliant man, with his vision of change, not only for Stark Industries, but for the entire _world_ , this man who has overcome hardship and betrayal and unimaginable experiences – Pepper finds herself thinking, far too late to stop it from happening: _I think I could love this man._

 


End file.
